The Paradoxical Commandments
by Dr. Kent M. Keith
(The paradoxical commandments are often mistakenly attributed to Mother Teresa. Eight of the Paradoxical Commandments were used in Mother Teresa: A Simple Path, compiled by Lucinda Vardey, 1995.)
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
© Copyright Kent M. Keith 1968, renewed 2001
Friday, September 05, 2008
An Excerpt From:
THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN
A Tale of Spiritual Seduction
by Martha Sherrill
Prologue
A stupa is a holy thing, a monument to peace and harmony. It is a place where the Buddha's mind is alive on earth. That's what I was told, anyway, when I first came to Poolesville, Maryland, and what I still believe, in spite of everything else I know.
The moon was rising in the dark blue sky. It was a harvest moon, a warm moon, full and golden. It was the fall of 1996. The next morning a retreat would begin, a bodhicitta or compassion retreat. I arrived on the temple grounds very late, parked my car, and walked past the main building of the temple, a large white plantation-style mansion. The temple looked quiet behind its spread of green grass. Only a few dim lights were still on. Through a window I saw a flash of a burgundy robe inside the Dharma room—a monk or nun was cleaning the altar bowls. I wasn't going inside. Instead, I walked down the long driveway in the direction of the dark woods. I went to the Migyur Dorje stupa when I was confused, when my mind needed clearing, simplicity, a broad brushstroke, a big PICTURE. When I needed to relax.
I'd been told that if you walk around a stupa, clockwise, you will receive blessings. I still believe that, too. There are all kinds of explanations of what a stupa is, of course, and how one works. There are academic tracts with detailed diagrams, discussions of the various types of stupas, and essays abou
t the metaphysical properties of these compelling shrines. You can be as highbrow as you want about stupas—just as Buddhism itself can be terribly highbrow—or you can try to comprehend a stupa simply and forget the details. You can walk around one, clockwise, as the Tibetans do, and just soak up the blessings. I had purchased miniature stupas from the temple gift shop in Poolesville. I collected photographs of stupas and books about them. I became fascinated with the inner chambers of the stupas, and the secret contents. Sometimes my passion was a little hard to explain to my journalist friends. To the unromantic eye, I suppose, a stupa doesn't look like much. The Buddha's mind is just a monolith, really—an obelisk with a pagoda roof and a spire. At the highest point, there was a crystal ball pointing to the sky.
I took the shortcut in the woods and found the narrow dirt road that led to the great stupa. When I had started coming to Poolesville regularly, just a year before, there had been plans to pave the stupa road—but it was still potholed and loaded with hazardous puddles and large rocks. Vines were curling out of the forest, too, dangling down from trees and growing back into the path.
A stupa is a magical thing, seductive and mysterious, but also very simple. Maybe that's what I like about them. There is no debate waging about stupas—no controversies swirling within the rarified world of Tibetan Buddhism about what a stupa really is. A stupa is perfection. A stupa is emptiness, and a stupa can't break your heart.
A tulku is a little harder to comprehend. Like a stupa, a tulku is also a living Buddha and supposed to be perfect. That's what I was told, at any rate, when I first arrived in Poolesville. But a tulku is a human being—a person with a childhood, with parents, with loves and losses, with regrets, with needs and dreams. Which brings me to Jetsunma. She is a tulku. And she is the one who lured me to Poolesville and to this place called Kunzang Odsal Palyul Changchub Choling, or Fully Awakened Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light. For a year I had been coming to Poolesville as a journalist, and this mysterious woman called Jetsunma—an American woman and a Tibetan Buddhist lama—was my subject.
I had met Jetsunma in 1993, when I came to interview her for a profile in Elle magazine. She was in her mid-forties at the time and wore her dark hair long and curly. I couldn't help but notice her eye makeup, and the red polish on her nails. She was earthy, worldly, a shade tacky. She cracked jokes and seemed to tell the truth, even if it was unflattering—confessing to me at one point that she'd bought her long, flowery-print skirt on sale at The Limited. I was charmed by her wisdom and good humor. She seemed without pretensions or pious sanctimony. To me, there was some thing very special about her. And, clearly, I wasn't the only one. A tulku is thought to be a reincarnated saint, an enlightened lama who is able to choose the circumstances of his or her rebirth—and return to earth or our human realm, as the Buddhists call it, specifically to help end suffering. Within the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, she held a revered position, particularly for a Western woman. Her long Tibetan name, Jetsunnia Ahkon Norbu Lhamo, carries the honorific Jetsunma—one of the religion's most regal titles. And the Tibetan Buddhist center she had founded in 1986 had quickly become one of the most prominent in the United States. It was crowded with families and lay practitioners—nearly all Westerners—who had come to study Tibetan Buddhism with Jetsunma. She was also running the largest monastery of Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in America.
When I ventured there in 1993 to meet Jetsunma, I knew next to nothing about Tibetan Buddhism, apart from what I'd picked up in mainstream media and what I'd witnessed during a childhood spent in California, where the practice of various kinds of Buddhism seems more prevalent. I was naive, I suppose, and was pulled toward Jetsunma by something in me not entirely rational. She seemed to have created an enchanted world and a radical place beyond the laws of physics and government. And at the same time it seemed happy in a way that the newsroom world, where I had spent the last ten years, did not. Bitterness is rampant in journalism, as is a vague malaise: My desk at the newspaper was surrounded on all sides by the desks of people taking antidepressants. Was there something special about Tibetan Buddhism that made people content, or was it simply the lush temple grounds? At KPC—as it is called by the students—there are seventy-two acres of woods and gardens to walk in, hidden shrines to peek at, prayer wheels to spin, and benches to rest your legs. Everywhere, it seemed, pale-colored prayer flags were blowing softly in the breeze. Outside the main building there were shoes scattered about. Inside there was a funky gift shop selling Buddhist books, crystals, and postcards of His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet (does he ever not smile?). There was a buzz in the air, a freshness and vitality. The nuns and monks, dressed in long burgundy and saffron robes, were for the most part Americans, and they went about their duties with a playfulness and wit that surprised me. The rooms were crowded with colorful Buddhist icons and artifacts and ritual instruments, but at the same time they had a feeling of warmth and familiarity, a feeling of home.
And there were a number of exquisite spire-topped stupas to circumambulate in Poolesville, too—all conceived by Jetsunma and executed by her students—but nothing compared in beauty and magnitude with the great Migyur Dorje stupa. Early in the summer of 1995, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche had visited Poolesville from India and had given Jetsunma a rare collection of ancient relics, perhaps the rarest and most potent combination of Tibetan Buddhist relics in the West. And Jetsunma had set out to build a stupa worthy of them. This book begins with the construction of this stupa, during the late summer of 1995. It tells the story of Jetsunma and how her monastery came to exist. It tells the stories of Alana Elgin, Sherab Khandro, and Dechen Grissom—three women who met up with Jetsunma and vowed to devote their lives to her and the Dharma, of the teachings of the Buddha. It also describes my own turbulent first year in Poolesville, which began in the fall of 1995 and which ended in September 1996 at the time of the compassion retreat.
When I arrived in the clearing in the woods where the stupa stood, the moonlight was streaming down on the magnificent monument like liquid from the sky. I could see the roughness of the concrete—it still hadn't been sanded or painted. And the impressive landscaping plans for an amphitheater and waterfall, for shrubs and well-placed spotlights, were still on hold. The money had run out, or had been spent on other things.
But even so, in the darkness and surrounded by the woods, the stupa had an unworldly loveliness. Neglect didn't mask its power but almost emphasized it. In a way it seemed as natural and alive as the forest. I liked the way the concrete was stained and imperfect. And in the bright moonlight I could see the crystal ball glowing quietly at the top. Standing on the ground and looking up at the stupa's base, I was moved—the stupa moved me like no historical monument in Washington ever had.
I had seen this stupa come from nothing. I'd seen the place in the woods before the trees were cleared. I'd seen a deep hole dug in the summer heat. I'd seen an eclectic young crew of six Americans work tirelessly, selflessly, with the sort of energy and devotion and faith that gave me a kind of hope myself. There had been aching elbows and knees and shoulders. There had been accidents and sleepless nights. They had bent rebar and made molds. They had poured buckets and buckets of concrete. And as the stupa had come to life, inch by inch, and grown taller and taller, I had seen bags and bags of rice and beans passed person by person and then lowered into its belly. I had seen a long cedar tree lying on its side in the prayer room—its branches shorn, its body smooth—and seen it painted red with gold Tibetan lettering. The relics were placed in little clear plastic boxes and carefully tied to the painted tree with silk string. One box contained an ancient fingerbone of Migyur Dorje; another housed a "brain pill" of a great wisdom being. And one small clear box was said to hold the crystallized breath of the Buddha himself.
In the darkness and moonlight, as I began to walk around the stupa, clockwise, a thought came into my mind. It was as though the stupa itself had whispered it to me. There are sacred things. There are sacred towers and sacred texts and sacred teachings and sacred traditions. And the truth is, absolutely everything sacred has some people behind it.
Excerpted from The Buddha from Brooklyn by Martha Sherrill. Copyright© 2000 by Martha Sherrill. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN
A Tale of Spiritual Seduction
by Martha Sherrill
Prologue
A stupa is a holy thing, a monument to peace and harmony. It is a place where the Buddha's mind is alive on earth. That's what I was told, anyway, when I first came to Poolesville, Maryland, and what I still believe, in spite of everything else I know.
The moon was rising in the dark blue sky. It was a harvest moon, a warm moon, full and golden. It was the fall of 1996. The next morning a retreat would begin, a bodhicitta or compassion retreat. I arrived on the temple grounds very late, parked my car, and walked past the main building of the temple, a large white plantation-style mansion. The temple looked quiet behind its spread of green grass. Only a few dim lights were still on. Through a window I saw a flash of a burgundy robe inside the Dharma room—a monk or nun was cleaning the altar bowls. I wasn't going inside. Instead, I walked down the long driveway in the direction of the dark woods. I went to the Migyur Dorje stupa when I was confused, when my mind needed clearing, simplicity, a broad brushstroke, a big PICTURE. When I needed to relax.
I'd been told that if you walk around a stupa, clockwise, you will receive blessings. I still believe that, too. There are all kinds of explanations of what a stupa is, of course, and how one works. There are academic tracts with detailed diagrams, discussions of the various types of stupas, and essays abou
t the metaphysical properties of these compelling shrines. You can be as highbrow as you want about stupas—just as Buddhism itself can be terribly highbrow—or you can try to comprehend a stupa simply and forget the details. You can walk around one, clockwise, as the Tibetans do, and just soak up the blessings. I had purchased miniature stupas from the temple gift shop in Poolesville. I collected photographs of stupas and books about them. I became fascinated with the inner chambers of the stupas, and the secret contents. Sometimes my passion was a little hard to explain to my journalist friends. To the unromantic eye, I suppose, a stupa doesn't look like much. The Buddha's mind is just a monolith, really—an obelisk with a pagoda roof and a spire. At the highest point, there was a crystal ball pointing to the sky.I took the shortcut in the woods and found the narrow dirt road that led to the great stupa. When I had started coming to Poolesville regularly, just a year before, there had been plans to pave the stupa road—but it was still potholed and loaded with hazardous puddles and large rocks. Vines were curling out of the forest, too, dangling down from trees and growing back into the path.
A stupa is a magical thing, seductive and mysterious, but also very simple. Maybe that's what I like about them. There is no debate waging about stupas—no controversies swirling within the rarified world of Tibetan Buddhism about what a stupa really is. A stupa is perfection. A stupa is emptiness, and a stupa can't break your heart.
A tulku is a little harder to comprehend. Like a stupa, a tulku is also a living Buddha and supposed to be perfect. That's what I was told, at any rate, when I first arrived in Poolesville. But a tulku is a human being—a person with a childhood, with parents, with loves and losses, with regrets, with needs and dreams. Which brings me to Jetsunma. She is a tulku. And she is the one who lured me to Poolesville and to this place called Kunzang Odsal Palyul Changchub Choling, or Fully Awakened Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light. For a year I had been coming to Poolesville as a journalist, and this mysterious woman called Jetsunma—an American woman and a Tibetan Buddhist lama—was my subject.
I had met Jetsunma in 1993, when I came to interview her for a profile in Elle magazine. She was in her mid-forties at the time and wore her dark hair long and curly. I couldn't help but notice her eye makeup, and the red polish on her nails. She was earthy, worldly, a shade tacky. She cracked jokes and seemed to tell the truth, even if it was unflattering—confessing to me at one point that she'd bought her long, flowery-print skirt on sale at The Limited. I was charmed by her wisdom and good humor. She seemed without pretensions or pious sanctimony. To me, there was some thing very special about her. And, clearly, I wasn't the only one. A tulku is thought to be a reincarnated saint, an enlightened lama who is able to choose the circumstances of his or her rebirth—and return to earth or our human realm, as the Buddhists call it, specifically to help end suffering. Within the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, she held a revered position, particularly for a Western woman. Her long Tibetan name, Jetsunnia Ahkon Norbu Lhamo, carries the honorific Jetsunma—one of the religion's most regal titles. And the Tibetan Buddhist center she had founded in 1986 had quickly become one of the most prominent in the United States. It was crowded with families and lay practitioners—nearly all Westerners—who had come to study Tibetan Buddhism with Jetsunma. She was also running the largest monastery of Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in America.
When I ventured there in 1993 to meet Jetsunma, I knew next to nothing about Tibetan Buddhism, apart from what I'd picked up in mainstream media and what I'd witnessed during a childhood spent in California, where the practice of various kinds of Buddhism seems more prevalent. I was naive, I suppose, and was pulled toward Jetsunma by something in me not entirely rational. She seemed to have created an enchanted world and a radical place beyond the laws of physics and government. And at the same time it seemed happy in a way that the newsroom world, where I had spent the last ten years, did not. Bitterness is rampant in journalism, as is a vague malaise: My desk at the newspaper was surrounded on all sides by the desks of people taking antidepressants. Was there something special about Tibetan Buddhism that made people content, or was it simply the lush temple grounds? At KPC—as it is called by the students—there are seventy-two acres of woods and gardens to walk in, hidden shrines to peek at, prayer wheels to spin, and benches to rest your legs. Everywhere, it seemed, pale-colored prayer flags were blowing softly in the breeze. Outside the main building there were shoes scattered about. Inside there was a funky gift shop selling Buddhist books, crystals, and postcards of His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet (does he ever not smile?). There was a buzz in the air, a freshness and vitality. The nuns and monks, dressed in long burgundy and saffron robes, were for the most part Americans, and they went about their duties with a playfulness and wit that surprised me. The rooms were crowded with colorful Buddhist icons and artifacts and ritual instruments, but at the same time they had a feeling of warmth and familiarity, a feeling of home.
And there were a number of exquisite spire-topped stupas to circumambulate in Poolesville, too—all conceived by Jetsunma and executed by her students—but nothing compared in beauty and magnitude with the great Migyur Dorje stupa. Early in the summer of 1995, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche had visited Poolesville from India and had given Jetsunma a rare collection of ancient relics, perhaps the rarest and most potent combination of Tibetan Buddhist relics in the West. And Jetsunma had set out to build a stupa worthy of them. This book begins with the construction of this stupa, during the late summer of 1995. It tells the story of Jetsunma and how her monastery came to exist. It tells the stories of Alana Elgin, Sherab Khandro, and Dechen Grissom—three women who met up with Jetsunma and vowed to devote their lives to her and the Dharma, of the teachings of the Buddha. It also describes my own turbulent first year in Poolesville, which began in the fall of 1995 and which ended in September 1996 at the time of the compassion retreat.
When I arrived in the clearing in the woods where the stupa stood, the moonlight was streaming down on the magnificent monument like liquid from the sky. I could see the roughness of the concrete—it still hadn't been sanded or painted. And the impressive landscaping plans for an amphitheater and waterfall, for shrubs and well-placed spotlights, were still on hold. The money had run out, or had been spent on other things.
But even so, in the darkness and surrounded by the woods, the stupa had an unworldly loveliness. Neglect didn't mask its power but almost emphasized it. In a way it seemed as natural and alive as the forest. I liked the way the concrete was stained and imperfect. And in the bright moonlight I could see the crystal ball glowing quietly at the top. Standing on the ground and looking up at the stupa's base, I was moved—the stupa moved me like no historical monument in Washington ever had.
I had seen this stupa come from nothing. I'd seen the place in the woods before the trees were cleared. I'd seen a deep hole dug in the summer heat. I'd seen an eclectic young crew of six Americans work tirelessly, selflessly, with the sort of energy and devotion and faith that gave me a kind of hope myself. There had been aching elbows and knees and shoulders. There had been accidents and sleepless nights. They had bent rebar and made molds. They had poured buckets and buckets of concrete. And as the stupa had come to life, inch by inch, and grown taller and taller, I had seen bags and bags of rice and beans passed person by person and then lowered into its belly. I had seen a long cedar tree lying on its side in the prayer room—its branches shorn, its body smooth—and seen it painted red with gold Tibetan lettering. The relics were placed in little clear plastic boxes and carefully tied to the painted tree with silk string. One box contained an ancient fingerbone of Migyur Dorje; another housed a "brain pill" of a great wisdom being. And one small clear box was said to hold the crystallized breath of the Buddha himself.
In the darkness and moonlight, as I began to walk around the stupa, clockwise, a thought came into my mind. It was as though the stupa itself had whispered it to me. There are sacred things. There are sacred towers and sacred texts and sacred teachings and sacred traditions. And the truth is, absolutely everything sacred has some people behind it.
Excerpted from The Buddha from Brooklyn by Martha Sherrill. Copyright© 2000 by Martha Sherrill. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
to love another
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult task of all...
the work for which all other work is but preparation.
It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen...
a great claim upon us,
something that chooses us out and calls us to vast things.
~Rilke
art used with permission
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult task of all...
the work for which all other work is but preparation.
It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen...
a great claim upon us,
something that chooses us out and calls us to vast things.
~Rilke
art used with permission
With That Moon Language
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
this great pull in us to
connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
~hafiz
art used with permission
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
this great pull in us to
connect.Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
~hafiz
art used with permission
My Sweet, Crushed Angel
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.
You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet, crushed angel,
To have ever neared God's heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
And even His best musicians are not always easy
To hear.
So what if the music has stopped for a while.
So what
If the price of admission to the Divine
Is out of reach tonight.
So what, my dear,
If you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.
The mind and the body are famous
For holding the heart ransom,
But Hafiz knows the Beloved's eternal habits.
Have patience,
For He will not be able to resist your longing
For Long.
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.
You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet,
O my sweet crushed angel.
~ Hafiz
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.
You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet, crushed angel,
To have ever neared God's heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
And even His best musicians are not always easy
To hear.
So what if the music has stopped for a while.
So what
If the price of admission to the Divine
Is out of reach tonight.
So what, my dear,
If you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.
The mind and the body are famous
For holding the heart ransom,
But Hafiz knows the Beloved's eternal habits.
Have patience,
For He will not be able to resist your longing
For Long.
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.
You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet,
O my sweet crushed angel.
~ Hafiz
art used with permission
it happens all the time in heaven
It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day
It will begin to happen
Again on earth -
That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,
And women and women
Who give each other
Light,
Often will get down on their knees
And while so tenderly
Holding their lover's hand,
With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,
"My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;
How can I be more
Kind?"
~Hafiz
And some day
It will begin to happen
Again on earth -
That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,
And women and women
Who give each other
Light,
Often will get down on their knees
And while so tenderly
Holding their lover's hand,
With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,
"My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;
How can I be more
Kind?"
~Hafiz
art used with permission
circles
The moon is most happy
When it is full.
And the sun always looks
Like a perfectly minted gold coin
That was just polished
And placed in flight
By God's playful kiss.
And so many varieties of fruit
Hang plump and round
From branches that seem like a Sculptor's hands.
I see the beautiful curve of a pregnant belly
Shaped by a soul within,
And the Earth itself,
And the planets and the spheres --
I have gotten the hint:
There is something about circles
The Beloved likes.
Within the Circle of a Perfect One
There is an Infinite Community
Of Light.
~Hafiz
When it is full.
And the sun always looks
Like a perfectly minted gold coin
That was just polished
And placed in flight
By God's playful kiss.
And so many varieties of fruit
Hang plump and round
From branches that seem like a Sculptor's hands.
I see the beautiful curve of a pregnant belly
Shaped by a soul within,
And the Earth itself,
And the planets and the spheres --
I have gotten the hint:
There is something about circles
The Beloved likes.
Within the Circle of a Perfect One
There is an Infinite Community
Of Light.
~Hafiz
art by permission
light
Light
Will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage,
For a divine seed,
The crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient,
Fertile plain
You hold the title to.
Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy
Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.
A life-giving radiance will come,
The Friend's gratuity will come
O look again within yourself,
For I know you were once the elegant host
To all the marvels in creation.
From a sacred crevice in your body
A bow rises each night
And shoots your soul into God.
~Hafiz
Will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage,
For a divine seed,
The crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient,
Fertile plain
You hold the title to.Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy
Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.
A life-giving radiance will come,
The Friend's gratuity will come
O look again within yourself,
For I know you were once the elegant host
To all the marvels in creation.
From a sacred crevice in your body
A bow rises each night
And shoots your soul into God.
~Hafiz
art used by permission
let your worship song be silence
What is worship? Who are this man
and this woman bringing flowers?
What kinds of flowers should be brought,
and what streamwater poured over the images?
Real worship is done by the mind
(Let that be a man) and by the desire
(Let that be a woman). And let those two
choose what to sacrifice.
There is a liquid that can be released
from under the mask of the face,
a nectar which when it rushes down
gives discipline and strength.
Let that be your sacred pouring.
Let your worship song be silence
~ lalla
and this woman bringing flowers?
What kinds of flowers should be brought,
and what streamwater poured over the images?
Real worship is done by the mind
(Let that be a man) and by the desire
(Let that be a woman). And let those two
choose what to sacrifice.
There is a liquid that can be released
from under the mask of the face,
a nectar which when it rushes down
gives discipline and strength.
Let that be your sacred pouring.
Let your worship song be silence
~ lalla
rise early
Rise early
when summer darkness
still enwraps the trees.
Walk into the dark forest
with only your attentive heart.
Gaze toward the east,
take a deep breath, and wait.
After a short while you will see God
carrying a lantern through the forest,
bits of light bobbing up and down
in and out, higher and higher
the light climbs, spilling over
into the spaces between the leaves
and on into the world
beyond the forest.
Then the beautiful darkness
hands you over to the light.
It slips away reverently
into the bark of the tree trunks
into the black earth
into all those other countries
that wait for its return.
Lift your face to the day-star now.
Experience the coming of dawn.
Bathed in morning light, pray
that the lantern of your life
move gently this day
into all those places
where light is needed.
© Macrina Wiederkehr
All rights reserved.
from The Circle of Life published March 2005,
by Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr
when summer darkness
still enwraps the trees.
Walk into the dark forest
with only your attentive heart.
Gaze toward the east,
take a deep breath, and wait.
After a short while you will see God
carrying a lantern through the forest,
bits of light bobbing up and down
in and out, higher and higher
the light climbs, spilling over
into the spaces between the leaves
and on into the world
beyond the forest.
Then the beautiful darkness
hands you over to the light.
It slips away reverently
into the bark of the tree trunks
into the black earth
into all those other countries
that wait for its return.
Lift your face to the day-star now.
Experience the coming of dawn.
Bathed in morning light, pray
that the lantern of your life
move gently this day
into all those places
where light is needed.
© Macrina Wiederkehr
All rights reserved.
from The Circle of Life published March 2005,
by Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr
photography by permission
the practice
at the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. ~plato
and always remember
that love is
that love is
not a feeling
fleeting and random
like running thoughts
not a gift that
visits the lucky
the blessed
the deserving
but a practice
renewed each time you
show up
rehearsing what you want
to become
it will
deepen with time
you will
hold the space
longer
stay at its center no matter
how clear or snowy the reception
how clear or snowy the reception
our mothers were right when they
told us to keep at it
like anything else
if you practice love regularly
if you practice love regularly
you cannot not
get better at it
remember
that is the secret:
practice love like fluid breaths
practice love like open arms
practice love like child’s play
just practice.
~Yael Flusberg
moses and the shepherd
Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying,
"God, Where are you? I want to help you,
to fix your shoes and comb your hair.
I want to wash your clothes and pick the lice off.
I want to bring you milk,
to kiss your little hands and feet when it's time
for you to go to bed. I want to sweep your room
and keep it neat.
God, my sheep and goats
are yours. All I can say, remembering you,
is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhh."
Moses could stand it no longer.
"Who are you talking to?"
"The one who made us,
and made the earth and the sky."
"Don't talk about shoes
and socks with God!
And what's this with your little hands
and feet? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
you're chatting with your uncles.
Only something that grows
needs milk. Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not God!
Even if you meant God's human representatives,
as when God said, 'I was sick and you did not visit me,
even then this tone would be foolish and irreverent.
Use appropriate terms. Fatima is a fine name
for a woman, but if you call a man Fatima,
it's an insult. Body-and-birth language
are right for us on this side of the river,
but not for addressing the origin,
not for Allah."
The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed
and wandered into the desert.
A sudden revelation came then to Moses.
God's voice:
You have separated
me from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite,
or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong for you is right for him.
What is poisonous to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It's all praise, and it's all right.
It's not me that's glorified in acts of worship.
It's the worshipers! I don't hear the words
they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be friends with your burning.
Burn up your thinking and your forms of expression!
Moses, those who pay attention to ways of behaving
and speaking are one sort.
Lovers who burn are another.
Don't impose a property tax
on a burned-out village. Don't scold the Lover.
The "wrong" way he talks is better than a hundred"right" ways of others.
Inside the Kaaba
it doesn't matter which direction you point
your prayer rug!
The ocean diver doesn't need snowshoes!
The love-religion has not code or doctrine.
Only God.
So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
It doesn't need markings."
God began speaking
deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words,
which cannot be recorded here, poured into
and through him. He left himself and came back.
He went to eternity and came back here.
Many times this happened.
It's foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot human intelligences.
It would shatter all writing pens.
Moses ran after the shepherd.
He followed the bewildered footprints,
in one place moving straight like a castle
across a chessboard. In another, sideways,
like a bishop.
Now surging like a wave cresting,
now sliding down like a fish,
with always his feet
making geomancy symbols in the sand,
recording
his wandering state.
Moses finally caught up with him.
"I was wrong. God has revealed to me
that there are no rules for worship.
Say whatever and however your loving tells you to.
Your sweet blasphemy
is the truest devotion.
Through you a whole world is freed.
Loosen your tongue and don't worry what comes out,
It's all the light of the spirit.
"The shepherd replied, "Moses, Moses,
I've gone beyond even that.
You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped
on itself. The divine nature of my human nature
came together.
Bless your scolding hand and your arm.
I can't say what has happened.
What I'm saying now
is not my real condition. It can't be said.
"The shepherd grew quiet.
When you look in a mirror,
you see yourself, not the state of the mirror.
The flute player puts breath into the flute,
and who makes the music? Not the flute,
The flute player!
Whenever you speak praise
or thanksgiving to God, it's always like
this dear shepherd's simplicity.
When you eventually see
through the veils to how things really are,
you will keep saying again and again,
"This is certainly not like we thought it was!"
~Rumi
"God, Where are you? I want to help you,
to fix your shoes and comb your hair.
I want to wash your clothes and pick the lice off.
I want to bring you milk,
to kiss your little hands and feet when it's time
for you to go to bed. I want to sweep your room
and keep it neat.
God, my sheep and goats
are yours. All I can say, remembering you,
is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhh."
Moses could stand it no longer.
"Who are you talking to?"
"The one who made us,
and made the earth and the sky."
"Don't talk about shoes
and socks with God!
And what's this with your little hands
and feet? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
you're chatting with your uncles.
Only something that grows
needs milk. Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not God!
Even if you meant God's human representatives,
as when God said, 'I was sick and you did not visit me,
even then this tone would be foolish and irreverent.
Use appropriate terms. Fatima is a fine name
for a woman, but if you call a man Fatima,
it's an insult. Body-and-birth language
are right for us on this side of the river,
but not for addressing the origin,
not for Allah."
The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed
and wandered into the desert.
A sudden revelation came then to Moses.
God's voice:
You have separated
me from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite,
or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong for you is right for him.
What is poisonous to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It's all praise, and it's all right.
It's not me that's glorified in acts of worship.
It's the worshipers! I don't hear the words
they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be friends with your burning.
Burn up your thinking and your forms of expression!
Moses, those who pay attention to ways of behaving
and speaking are one sort.
Lovers who burn are another.
Don't impose a property tax
on a burned-out village. Don't scold the Lover.
The "wrong" way he talks is better than a hundred"right" ways of others.
Inside the Kaaba
it doesn't matter which direction you point
your prayer rug!
The ocean diver doesn't need snowshoes!
The love-religion has not code or doctrine.
Only God.
So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
It doesn't need markings."
God began speaking
deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words,
which cannot be recorded here, poured into
and through him. He left himself and came back.
He went to eternity and came back here.
Many times this happened.
It's foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot human intelligences.
It would shatter all writing pens.
Moses ran after the shepherd.
He followed the bewildered footprints,
in one place moving straight like a castle
across a chessboard. In another, sideways,
like a bishop.
Now surging like a wave cresting,
now sliding down like a fish,
with always his feet
making geomancy symbols in the sand,
recording
his wandering state.
Moses finally caught up with him.
"I was wrong. God has revealed to me
that there are no rules for worship.
Say whatever and however your loving tells you to.
Your sweet blasphemy
is the truest devotion.
Through you a whole world is freed.
Loosen your tongue and don't worry what comes out,
It's all the light of the spirit.
"The shepherd replied, "Moses, Moses,
I've gone beyond even that.
You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped
on itself. The divine nature of my human nature
came together.
Bless your scolding hand and your arm.
I can't say what has happened.
What I'm saying now
is not my real condition. It can't be said.
"The shepherd grew quiet.
When you look in a mirror,
you see yourself, not the state of the mirror.
The flute player puts breath into the flute,
and who makes the music? Not the flute,
The flute player!
Whenever you speak praise
or thanksgiving to God, it's always like
this dear shepherd's simplicity.
When you eventually see
through the veils to how things really are,
you will keep saying again and again,
"This is certainly not like we thought it was!"
~Rumi
understanding
such a fuss is made
of tolerance
how it's the way we all should be
but tolerance itself
implies opposition
and making do with how another is
when what we'd really like is to make him
more of the same of what we are
no, tolerance is not the way to be
but instead
sits in the shadow
of something greater
of acceptance
and surrender
to the differences we find
but think a bit on acceptance
and you will discover
yet a better way to be
and that of understanding,
not just accepting,
but understanding the differences we find
understanding leaves no room for reasoning
goes beyond thinking
or of might
understanding
puts one into the space of another
with recognition of one's self
in understanding
and seeing himself in another
his seeing becomes knowing
and in knowing
he is becoming
and the two
are one
~ Diana Christine
of tolerance
how it's the way we all should be
but tolerance itself
implies opposition
and making do with how another is
when what we'd really like is to make him
more of the same of what we are
no, tolerance is not the way to be
but instead
sits in the shadow
of something greater
of acceptance
and surrender
to the differences we find
but think a bit on acceptance
and you will discover
yet a better way to be
and that of understanding,
not just accepting,
but understanding the differences we find
understanding leaves no room for reasoning
goes beyond thinking
or of might
understanding
puts one into the space of another
with recognition of one's self
in understanding
and seeing himself in another
his seeing becomes knowing
and in knowing
he is becoming
and the two
are one
~ Diana Christine
photography by permission
cindy lee jones
cindy lee jones
now
my purest truth
photography by permission
is found within
this present moment
my most exquisite memory
my greatest expectation
nothing but a thief
my richest gifts
inhabit
my richest gifts
inhabit
here and now
~diana christine
photography by permission
Guest House...Rumi
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
~Rumi
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
~Rumi
photograpy with permission
cindy lee jones
cindy lee jones
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